Fragments
by seasame smiles
Summary: There are no happily ever afters after the war.


_Fragments_

Harry has split his life into two parts: _before _and _after._ There's a line dividing the eighteen years he's lived, like a mental mockery of the wall of Berlin, and when he thinks about it, and he does more than he'd ever admit, he likens before to happiness and after to a haze of memories that he can't remember clearly.

In the beginning, just after his life changed and they changed and nothing was ever the same because they became broken souls who had lost far, far too much and gained nothing but heartache, he used to cut. His arms tell a story of broken dreams and insomnia filled nights with only the steady _drip drip drip_ to break the cold silence that settled on his life like a plague - and he welcomed it, the way the bright red would break through the pallid white and fall onto too-dark black of his flat's floor (because it was hard waking up every morning in the solemn Burrow and seeing how _empty_ George's eyes were or how Mrs Weasley would look at her clock and cry when Fred's hand wasn't there or how Ginny stopped eating and became a fading ember in contrast to her once bright spark, so bright he would be blinded by its brilliance and fall in love with her every day, over and over again).

And when cutting wasn't allowed anymore by Hermione Granger - the new version who _reads _and _reads_ and _reads_ because anything is better than the reality she's found herself in - he found solace in alcohol. He likes to be so drunk that he can't think about anything anymore, so that he can't see demon red eyes fading, _fading_, or hear remnants of a conversation he still can't believe happened or feel the aching pain that lingers from some injury that never got healed properly.

A long time ago, before Harry had ever tasted Firewhiskey or ended up waking up in the wrong bed with the wrong girl (but everything is so _wrong _and Harry is _confused _because _aren't heroes supposed to have happily ever afters?_) or went to battle with the Dark Lord, when the boy under the stairs became Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived, Harry saw the world as a black and white place, where good is white and evil is black - but now Harry knows that the bad guys wear black robes and white masks and the good guys wear whatever they managed to pull on when the first battle warning was issued. There is no good or evil. Voldemort was right about something.

Then, one horrifying night when Sirius fell into a Veil, Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived, became Harry Potter, the boy who had eyes that knew too much but a mouth that said too little because he was afraid to tell people that the monsters under the bed were really _inside _people and that he wasn't strong enough to defeat the Dark Lord.

And Harry changed. He became stronger, he became a hero and they loved him for it and no one bothered to notice when those once lovely emerald eyes became slightly mad and dark because they were afraid of things that are outside in the dark and Harry was one of those things and if they ignored it, everything was okay and, really, wasn't that what everyone_ needed_ to hear?

Now, that boy/man no longer exists. There is just a man, a broken man with jaded eyes that doesn't like being sober because the monsters inside him are scarier than any Death Eater ever was. The hero is dead. And underneath the mask, the costume, Harry is tired and he smokes and he drinks and he's a great example of what life does to you.

In the midst of the drinking and the smoking, Harry gets given drugs - and it's beautiful because there is no focus, nothing to hold onto and he is slipping down a dark tunnel with no end and he is floating, high, high, _higher_, and his demons are trying to drag him down but he's laughing and _it's okay, it's okay, _he says and maybe he might actually mean it this time. And by the time he has fallen to the ground, hitting it with a too-loud smack for hungover ears, his life is already ruined and he can see his friends shaking their heads at him, eyes disappointed but he's fallen much too far for redemption and maybe that's for the best (Draco Malfoy would be laughing if he wasn't dead).

Harry is_ killing himself_, slowly, bit by bit, drink by drink, hit by hit, puff by puff - he hates what's happened to him but he hates facing his problems even more so he drinks until he can't remember his name and then hates himself just that little bit more for being so _weak_. This self destruction is such a tragic thing. He could've been someone, an Auror, had a life but Harry is tired and broken and scared so he forgets the little child who had promise and reveals the guise of a man too broken to care about what they print about him in the Daily Prophet. He's sorry; he remembers telling Hermione that it would be okay, after the battle when they were still bloody and exhausted but _alive_ (but this isn't living anymore, it's existing and the dead are the only lucky ones here), and he's sorry for lying because it's _not_ okay and he lets out a sob because he's tired and he's tired of being tired.

Ron and Hermione and the Weasleys stop seeing him after George kills himself (they're told that Harry gave him the pills and he did, but what kind of life was one-eared, twinless George Weasley living anyway? They didn't understand the emptiness like Harry did and he doesn't want others to end up like him: a not-quite alive man scrabbling at the edges of sanity with his very fingertips and flailing and falling into a pit of despair that goes right into the very pits of Tartarus to the resounding laughter of Beelzebub himself.) and when Harry finally dies of an overdoes one sunny August morning (ironically little Ginny's birthday, but she's in the hospital because she's still not eating and they had to put her into a coma because she's broken, too, and they can't fix her), no one cares.

* * *

_14 years ago today, the Final Battle happened at Hogwarts - May 2nd, 1998 - so I thought I'd write something. Enjoy._

_^ I was going to post this on May 2nd, but hey, it's June now, so yeah.. maybe review? thanks._


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